Creeper World IXE breaks the RTS mold and adds a dash of Noita's alchemy to the gooey war

GamesRTSCreeper World IXE breaks the RTS mold and adds a dash of Noita’s alchemy to the gooey warWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Knuckle Cracker)

Creeper World IXE

How bad could cutting into a pipe filled with highly pressurized corrosive goo be? A question I have asked myself many times in just the first few hours of playing Creeper World IXE (pronounced “icks”), the latest in a long-running oddball indie strategy series. The answer, somehow, is always “very bad”. And yet I continue to do it. Partly because I’m an idiot, and partly because the results are always oddly spectacular, especially when every single pixel of the world is physically modelled.

Creeper World IXE Launch Trailer - YouTubeWatch On

Creeper World IXE Launch Trailer - YouTube

Sandbox strategy

Creeper World IXE is the sixth in the series (if we’re counting space combat spinoff Particle Fleet), and returns to the side-on ant-farm perspective of Creeper World 2, but blends in a hefty helping ofFalling Sandstyle particle simulation—the kind most recently seen in roguelike alchemical chaos simulatorNoita. It makes for a very granular, unusual battlefield where your terrain-editing ships are every bit as important as the ones with big lasers, giving the missions a more puzzle-like feel than other games in the series.

Everything from your fleet of spaceships (which don’t so much fly as disintegrate and rebuild themselves) to the terrain and the Creeper itself is physically modeled on a per-pixel basis, and each element interacts in interesting ways. Water turns non-interactable lava into excavatable rock. Acid and Pixelium form a Creeper-suppressing physical barrier, and there’s a little in-game cheat sheet showing you the other useful alchemical mixtures you can exploit. Gases rise and liquids build in pressure against stone walls, just waiting for you to pop the cork and scramble to cut through the tide to reach the leaky source inside.

(Image credit: Knuckle Cracker)

Creeper World IXE

Too greedily, too deep

Perhaps a little too fast, even. Creeper World IXE also has a lot of ideas and funky units introduced over the course of its relatively short 20-mission campaign, the most distinctive being a power-armored hero unit that you can control directly, platformer-style, shooting, transporting materials and blasting open paths through areas that your ships might not be able to reach. They’re very interesting, but new units and ideas are introduced at such a rate that they don’t really feel like they have room to breathe. This will become less of a problem over time as the community produces more levels (which you can access directly in-game), but you might feel a little rushed through the main story.

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Rushed feels like the word of the day. If there’s one thing holding Creeper World IXE back, it’s the interface. It’s notbadand works reasonably well once you adjust to it, but for some reason it defies standard RTS controls. There are no useful hotkeys for selecting or grouping units, and modifiers like Control and Shift are needed to do things as simple as drag-selecting ships. Likewise, digging, building shield tiles and clearing build orders feel a bit fiddlier than they should be. From what I’ve played, it would have made more sense (at least to my sludge-filled brain) to have separate unit command and terrain building modes that you switch between with a single toggle key.

(Image credit: Knuckle Cracker)

Creeper World IXE

The UI visuals are also an odd choice, reminding me of shareware-era programmer art, and a significant step down from the clean but classy layouts in Particle Fleet and Creeper World 4. While I dig the Amiga-esque aesthetics of the pixel world and ships, the buttons, boxes and menus feel less retro and more primitive. Especially when a lot of Amiga games hadabsolutely gorgeous interfaces. The tutorial videos in-game also hammer through ideas at a comical rate, and automatically move forward instead of pausing and repeating the one thing you’re trying to look up details on.

It’s a frustrating set of issues. Nothing that can’t be fixed or worked past once you’re over the initial learning curve, but it makes a rough first impression for newcomers to the series. All that being said, this is still a smart and creative evolution of the series, with a lot of fun new ideas that I hope to see the community properly explore, like the action-style power suit unit and zero-gravity levels. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that this one was pushed out the door a little prematurely. Still, an interesting new direction for a continually evolving series. Creeper World IXE isout now on Steamfor $17.99/£15.07, with a 10% launch discount running until December 26th.

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Sandbox strategy#

Too greedily, too deep#

The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals#

Sandbox strategy

Too greedily, too deep

The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals